​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 59 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.

​              The acrylic Coke bottles brazenly alternated with inverted Havana Club Rum bottles.  It was only one of the paintings, drawings, and other works at the art fair near our hotel.  Some of them were angry, some flirted with kitsch, some were skillful, but Sherrill and I were fascinated by all of it.  A breeze drifting up from the river brought complicated musical threads from a band nearby.   
              Havana, 2003: an old city, a hot and humid city in which bare skin was in fashion, a city rich with art and music.  We were there in a small group of eight with our friend Hala, who had arranged for us to visit in a special cultural program—an exception to the ban then on U.S. citizens going to Cuba.  At the airport in Miami we'd been warned not to lose our letter of permission from the U.S. government or we'd each have to pay an eight thousand dollar fine.  After an hour flight, we stepped down a rolling staircase to the Havana runway.  As soon as we walked out of the airport we came face to face with a 1948 Studebaker, the model with the pointed jet airplane grill in front. 

​              Sherrill and I strolled from the art fair to the Ambos Mundo hotel and its roof bar where Ernest Hemingway once hung out—navigating streams of people of all shapes and colors, most  of them part of a couple, family group, or cluster of friends, fingers clasped, arms entwined, hands on shoulders, waists, hips.  Crossing the Cathedral Plaza, we found ourselves absorbed into a crowd swaying and clapping hands to the beat of an Afro-Cuban band.  A buxom black woman in a white ruffled, multi-layered costume danced with heavy-footed fervor, cigar wedged between gold teeth, dark hands pummeling the air, white-turbaned head moving in hypnotic patterns.  Later, we learned that she was an incarnation of a Santeria priestess, a Cuban adaptation of a Yoruba West African ritual.  

​              At the roof bar, we joined half-a-dozen Cubans at the end of a long table.  Behind them, the white-shirted bartender had set up a row of tall glasses with sugar, mint, and lime juice waiting for the ice, soda water, and rum to make Mojitos.  As we sipped our drinks, splintered bits of Havana's skyline vibrated around us in the fading light.  We remembered the afternoon we walked past the crumbling mansions along the Malecon by the bay.  Waves battered and splashed over the seawall with a sound like music.  With a groan, a rusty wrought iron balcony separated from a house, falling to the pavement in front of us.
              The next day, a drive to Revolutionary Square gave us views of a monument to the national hero Jose Marti and a giant portrait of Che Guevara on the side of a large building.  Nearby, we saw a yellow sign with large black letters on a wall: "La Verdad sobre el BLOQUEO debe ser conocida."  Somebody translated it for us: "The truth about the blockade must be known."
              "Blockade?" I asked.
              "It's what Cubans call the U.S. Embargo."
              "And what is the truth?"
              "It's also called 'genocide' here."
              In a cafe where we stopped for lunch, an old man with a guitar appeared in the doorway as we ate a blockade "salad" of canned corn and canned peas.  He was followed by a skinny youth shaking a pair of castanets, both of them singing.  Their complicated salsa rhythms filled the air.
              "Music," we were told, "is one way to survive."

             Art, it seemed, was another way.  We drove across town to a narrow two block-long street where the facades had been transformed with wild splashes of color, stylized faces like African masks, giant fighting cocks, abstract patterns.  The alley was crowded with constructions made from scrap metal and pieces of decaying colonial buildings. 
           "Callejon de Hammel, a street of art, a celebration of Afro-Cuban culture.  Most of it relates to Santeria."
              "The cult?"
            "More than that.  A religion, a way of life.  Mix primitive Christian beliefs with West African gods worshiped by sugar plantation slaves, add rum and cigar smoke.  Result: Santeria.  Drums and rhythmic movement send you into a trance so you can communicate with your ancestors and their gods." 
              In a gallery, we discovered images and figures representing Yoruba/Santeria gods.
             "There is Oshun, the river goddess, Chango's favorite wife.  Chango evolved from the Yoruba god of thunder.  Oshun was the blood that created human life—also Our Lady of Charity. Two gods for the price of one, just as Chango also is St. Barbara, because they're both fond of hatchets.  The Santeria gods have both African and Catholic identities.  Gender is irrelevant." 
              All of this came together for us in a weathered colonial building in an old Havana neighborhood.  In the once grand house, we sat on folding chairs to watch brightly costumed dancers.  Chango led the way, followed by Eleggua, the teasing god, performed by a boyish young woman in motley costume, who pranced and leaped, sat on audience members' laps, snatched scarves or hats, then returned them to the wrong people, tossing back her head with silent laughter.  Then female dancers in green, white, and red dresses pranced and whirled, seducing bare-chested men who arched over them with erotic abandon.

​              A startling range of emotions burst from the dancers: between men and women, between men and men, and between men and their masters.  In one dance, both men and women wore clog-like sandals, dancing faster and faster.  Then one group of barefoot men leaped forward, rebelling, swinging machete blades.  The female dancers flapped their full skirts and stomped on the wood floor.  The men tossed aside their blades, replacing them with flaming torches that they waved in all directions.
              Leaving at the end of the show, Sherrill pointed up to an open window where a caramel-skinned girl not more than nine or ten in a white dress with a red bow in her black hair was swaying to the music pouring into the street.  Then, looking across the street, we saw painted on a wall beneath an old apartment building the red letters: "VIVA FIDEL."  

​              One memorable day, we drove from Havana to the Sierra del Rosario de la Biosfera, a protected ecological area, passing mango orchards and coffee and sugarcane plantations.   The sugar economy transformed the little town of Remedios, which at one time boasted 72 sugar mills, into a showplace of colonial architecture, but when the sugar mills closed, the town was forgotten, caught in the spider web of the past.  For three centuries, vast plantations produced sugar for external export.  Although Cuba could have fed itself, most of its land was used for sugar.  The United States was one guaranteed market.  

​              Money flowed in and out of Cuba, eventually much of it through the Mafia, so very little of the money reached the people.  After the dictator Batista was overthrown in 1959, an effort was made to end dependency on sugarcane, but the U.S. embargo drove Cuba to rely on exports to the Soviet Union and Eastern Block until they collapsed in 1989.  Although smaller than it once was, when we were there the sugarcane industry still employed more than 300,000 people.  On another day, we visited the remains of a once great sugar plantation, but Cuba, we were told, now was trying diversify its crops so it would be able to feed itself.  

​              A visit to a village school gave us an idea of how the Cuban educational system worked.  Education to age seventeen was free and compulsory through ninth grade.  Advanced education also was available for free through graduate-level studies, as were vocational schools.  The day was rounded out by visiting several artists' studios.  We were especially impressed by the work of Lester Campa, whose brilliant paintings explored in subtle and evocative ways issues of ecology and the environment. 
              The infamous Hotel Nacional, built in 1930, became popular with Americans during the last years of Prohibition and during the gangster era after.  Before long, it was the Havana headquarters of the Mafia. We were there one evening for a reunion concert of Cuban jazz greats, primarily from the "Buena Vista Social Club."  The hotel walls were covered with photographs of celebrities who had stayed there, including movie stars like Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra, politicians, and gangsters—including Mafia king Meyer Lansky.  Most of the band members were in their twenties and thirties, but the old timers were in their seventies and eighties.  As soon as they heard the applause as they came out, though, they seemed to swell up with new energy.  Sherrill, who used to play the clarinet and saxophone in bands, was impressed with their skill and energy at their ages.  

​              Sherrill and I took a taxi out to the suburbs on the other side of Havana one day to visit Ernest Hemingway's house, Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm).  The cab driver waited while we explored the one-story 1887 house and grounds.  Hemingway and his wife Martha Gelhorn bought the house in 1940.  His widow Mary Welsh donated it to Cuba.  In 1994, it was opened as a museum after restoration.  We couldn't go inside, since it was full of Hemingway's own possessions, but we could see the rooms very well through open doors and windows.  They were crowded with books, animal heads, and other memorabilia.  From the top of a tower that Mary had built for Hemingway, we could look over the grounds. 

​              That evening, in the dining room of our little hotel in the colonial town of Trinidad, a tall, lean man came over to our table.
              "Are you Canadian?" he asked me.  "I heard you speaking English."
              Sherrill gave me her "you've been talking too loudly again" look, but he was just curious about where we were from and was astounded when I admitted that all eight of us were from the U.S.   He and his wife, he said, were from Czechoslovakia.  He was even more amazed when I told him that Sherrill and I had visited his country in 1988. 
              "But you're Americans!" he gasped.  And the whole world knows, he implied, that Americans don't care about anyplace outside of their own little sphere.
              Standing there, we talked for a while about travel and America and making friends in different countries.  Before we left the dining room, he again vigorously pumped my hand. 

​              Driving around the back roads of Cuba, we saw many people with horse-drawn carts and wagons and using oxen for plowing.  With the U.S. embargo  and the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent fuel shortage, much of the rural area had returned to animal power.  Sometimes, in provincial towns, we saw three-wheeled bicycle taxis—not for tourists, but for local people.  

​              Sherrill's gift for making friends impressed everyone at the school for teachers of the arts in the town of Bayamo in southeastern Cuba.  A junior college level boarding school, it prepared young people to teach dance, music, theater, and the plastic arts.  The graduates were sent to where they were needed, so they could pay back the country for their free education.  We visited several classes, then went into a performance room where we were treated to musical presentations.  

​              During the show, Sherrill slipped out because she felt hot and claustrophobic.  When I looked for her later, I found only a cluster of students around a bench—then realized that she was sitting on it.  One of the art students, whose drawing she'd admired, had recognized her and given her the drawing.  Then other students had joined them until thirty or forty surrounded her, a few able to speak English.  A sixteen year-old theater arts student wanted to know if plays in America were more for message or entertainment, adding that theirs focused on message. 
              "Your wife is a very nice lady," one of the young people told me. 

​              Santiago de Cuba—a beautiful elegant, run-down, hilly city on a bay at the eastern end of the island, Cuba's second city—reminded Sherrill and me of San Francisco.  From the top level of the ancient El Morro fortress, we could see where the Spanish fleet was trapped during the Spanish-American War.  We continued to the Rum Museum downtown and to the Bacardi Museum of History and Art, built by one of the founders of Bacardi Rum, although after the 1959 revolution the whole Bacardi clan fled.  After dinner, I went for a walk along the hillside streets, among the once elegant old houses.  

​              Ready for a drink after my walk, I went to the terrace bar of our Santiago hotel, ordered a Mojito and sat at a small table by the railing looking over the busy plaza—the same plaza where Che announced that Batista had fled.  A pair of self-consciously hip Germans about thirty-five sat at the next table with two young Cuban women.   After a while, I flagged the waitress and asked how much for the Mojito.  She told me, but didn't take the money.  When I turned back around, I saw that one of the German men had gone off, apparently, to the restroom and his girl was looking at me.  I swiveled again trying to find the waitress.  This time, when I turned back, the girl was sitting at my table, smiling hopefully at me.  Maybe she thought I'd have more money than the younger German guy. 
              "Buenas Noches," I told her, picked up my money, and went to the bar to pay for my drink. 

​              Affordable medical care is an issue in much of world, but some countries have taken steps toward solving the problem.  Despite other issues, Cuba, we discovered, had gone a long way in that direction.  In a Santiago neighborhood of crowded Soviet-style apartment blocks, we visited the Polyclinic San Marti, clinic that provided services for more than 56,000 citizens, ranging from emergency care to routine and long-term care.  Most of the doctors here and across Cuba were women.  The Polyclinic was part of Cuba's tiered approach to medical care, which started with family doctors within the communities and continued with polyclinics and then bigger hospitals, if necessary. 
              The U.S. embargo, however, had affected Cuba's ability to get and maintain medical equipment. Cuba's clinics and hospitals could buy equipment from Japan, Sweden, Australia, and other countries, but couldn't get replacement parts from the U.S.  If a U.S. company bought a company in another country or even had a relationship with a company trading with Cuba, the Cuban medical facilities no longer could get machines or parts from them.  As a result, Cuba focused on keeping the population healthy through prevention programs.  

​              As we traveled across Cuba, we discovered that places important in the struggle to overthrow Batista's regime had been turned into pilgrimage sites.  In Santiago, we visited the Moncada Barracks, site of a major battle during  the revolution.  Its walls still displayed holes from Batista's machine guns.  The victory of Che Guevara's forces over Batista's army in the little city of Santa Clara had made it famous.  A monument and tomb for Che and his companions drew people from all over the world.  

​              Driving over the mountains to Baracoa in the northeast of the island, near where Columbus landed in 1492, we were delayed by a procession marching in honor of the National Day of Mourning.  Many of the several hundred people carried flowers, but in a cemetery around a bend in the road, more people waited with flowers for those who didn't have any.  Musicians in a bandstand were playing to welcome them.  This day of memories seemed to be a day of profound emotion.  

​              Toward the end of the trip, when Sherrill and I were back in Havana, we encountered dramatic, sometimes startling, examples of the emotions felt by Cubans and other third world peoples when they looked at their collective histories—at the huge 2003 Bienal art show held in the historic El Morro fort across the bay from old Havana, with installations from all over Latin America and the third world.  

​              Most of the installations were meant to be disturbing and, by and large, succeeded.  One chamber, installed by Nicaragua, was filled with hundreds of dummies piled as if they were corpses.  In another room, continuously playing television sets showed videos of wartime violence and another displayed photographs of mutilated bodies along with piles of prosthetic body parts.  In one large room, another parade of television sets played segments of Spanish language soap operas as examples of the subjection of women in Latin America.  Up near the ramparts, a shiny red Chevrolet from the 1950s was supported by at least forty black ankles and feet instead of wheels—a powerful political and economic statement.  And, in one of the smaller buildings, we found an exhibition about Che Guevara, probably the most interesting exhibit in the fort, although not part of the Bienal.   

​              On our flight from Havana to Miami I read an article in the Continental Airlines magazine on "profitable," "desirable" customers and "non-profitable," "undesirable" customers, and how to attract the former and ditch the latter—a jarring concept after everything we'd heard, seen, and experienced in Cuba.  In Miami, as we rode in our cab to our hotel, we were startled by the commercial billboards everywhere—selling products, not ideas.
To be continued.... 
 

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​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 58 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.

​           "Morocco," Sherrill declared, "is the most sexist country I've ever seen." 
        This was saying something, since by this time she'd seen a good chunk of the world.  I couldn't contradict her, though, because we had run into some outrageously sexist behavior there.  However, despite that and because of the efforts of our good friend Hala, Morocco turned out to be one the most exciting and memorable of our travels. 
           By day eight of the trip, our little group was on its third national guide.  The first two had resented working for a woman and had assumed that their job was to take us to pricy shops where they'd get kickbacks.  Marwan, our third guide, was different.  His English was a little shaky, but for the rest of the trip, in his full-length djellaba and pointed yellow babouches (slippers), he helped us through cities and over mountain paths, actually happy to show us his country. 

​        Casablanca was larger and more varied than Sherrill and I had expected, with funky markets and high rises, grand squares and shabby shopping areas.  The big surprise was the enormous new Hassan Mosque, third largest religious structure in the world.  Most of Europe's cathedrals could have been swallowed by this mosaic-skinned monster that held 25,000 worshippers at one time.  A young woman guided us through it, citing statistics to impress us.  Galleries for female worshippers looked down on the enormous room where many thousands of men could worship at the same time.
         "Why isn't there space down here for women?" Sherrill asked her.
         "Oh," replied the guide, "women are free to worship the same as men—up there." 
     Later, we learned that the 38 year-old new king, Mohammed VI, had recently married a commoner who was a computer engineer.  And, we were told, the new parliament about to open had thirty-five women members.  The crowds of young people and swarms of children that we saw verified that 71 percent of the Moroccan population was under 25 years old.  Maybe there was hope for the future. 

           We headed north along the coast to Rabat, capital of Morocco since independence in 1956.  The city, once French-influenced, seemed to have become a mishmash of architectural styles and neighborhoods, but still possessed a raffish charm, especially the cliff-side kasbah and walled medina, where we wandered along crowded cobblestone lanes, some so narrow that we could touch the buildings on both sides with outstretched arms as we peered into souks and shops.   

​    When we walked inside the crenellated walls of the Rabat kasbah, we might've wandered into an old Hollywood epic of Crusader knights vs. Arab warriors, but outside those kasbah walls feral cats lurked among Roman ruins.  Olive orchards and cork forests sprawling below the town reminded us of southern Spain and the sunlight and bold colors that invaded Matisse's dreams when he was in Morocco and forever influenced his art, dazzled us, too, but fear seemed to be keeping visitors away.  We saw few other Americans in this Moslem country.
         A drive through more olive groves on another day took us to Volubilis, the Roman empire's most remote outpost.  From here, lions and Barbary bears were sent to Rome to battle gladiators and wheat and olive oil were shipped to feed the restless masses.  Less than half of the site had been excavated, but what we saw was impressive—especially the huge, richly detailed mosaics.  Bulky stork nests balanced precariously atop some of the limestone columns, waiting for their tenants to return from the north.  

         We'd been looking forward to Fes, oldest of  Morocco's imperial cities, and the largest existing medieval city in the world.  The unmapped lanes and alleys of Fes's medina meandered invitingly behind stark brown walls for us to explore.  Our introduction to this maze of leaning, crumbling buildings was with a local guide, dodging crowds of people, flattening ourselves against dusty walls, and leaping into doorways to avoid heavily laden donkeys.  And, of course, beggars and hustlers pursued us.  There were no neighborhoods of rich or poor.  Everybody lived jumbled together behind the rosy-brown walls.  If you opened one of those ancient wooden doors you might find a palace or a slum or something in between.  Private lives were private—very private.

          The ancient buildings and covered bazaars were crumbling, yet bursting with humanity.  A stop at one of the leather dying shops reminded us of how hard it can be just to survive.  After climbing a series of staircases to the building roof, we looked down on young men wearing loincloths wading in vats of dye, legs and lower bodies stained by the dyes.  The stench of the manure-treated leather reached us even on the roof. 
           Outside the medina, we could see a dozen minarets of different sizes and shapes rising out of a sea of brown buildings.  Five times a day, we heard the competing calls to prayer.  One afternoon, I walked through the nearest gate into the medina.  Young men and boys rushed up to guide me.  I refused them, but they followed me down the steep, narrow streets, haranguing me in broken English.  I could see that I'd get lost among the abrupt turns and dividing and re-dividing lanes, so I found my own way out.  

         Climbing into the Middle Atlas mountain range after we left Fes, we drove higher and higher through cedar forests until we reached the 6,000 foot-high plateau where Bedouin shepherds made their seasonal migration each year.  Along the way, we saw a Bedouin camp on one of the rocky hills.  Hala and our driver hiked up to talk with them.  A little later, she returned to tell us that they'd invited us to visit their camp.  This Bedouin family of three generations had made a semi-permanent home on that rocky hillside, with their main goatskin tent, a cooking tent, an oven, and pens and corrals for livestock.  The women were friendly and the children curious.  All of the men except one and a 16 year-old boy were out with the goat herds.  

           The women were modestly dressed in patterned trousers covered with flowery dresses and skirts, sweaters and scarves, but not shy.  The matriarch of the family took a hot loaf of round flattish bread from the oven for us to sample: crisp on the outside, soft inside, delicious.  With Hala and the driver translating, we were able to talk with them.  Everyone had a job and responsibilities—although life on the rocky plateau was difficult, it wasn't intolerable. The boy showed us four day-old lambs nursing in a pen and a "rocking horse" for the small children made out of a stuffed wild cat mounted on a pair of rockers, a bit grungy but loved. 
      Continuing past volcanic cinder cones, we entered a rugged country of bizarre rock formations, mines, and fossils.  After a while, we stopped in a small Berber settlement for lunch.  While the rest of the group was having tea, I crossed the road to a shed in which a Berber man had set up a rock shop that included geodes, nautiloid fossils, trilobites, and other fossils.  I bought a perfect trilobite bigger than my fist, still within its rocky covering.  Later, Don, a geologist in our group, assured me that it was the real thing.  

      We met our third national guide in his flowing djellaba, yellow babouche slippers, and pale blue turban at our hotel in Erfoud at four a. m. the next morning when we gathered for a Land Rover trek into the desert.  Although fluent in French, Marwan was self-conscious about his English, but he didn't seem to be afflicted with the macho egotism rampant in Morocco. 
        We had traveled 450 km over the mountains in one day, partly along the winding Ziz river gorge, the result of centuries of erosion, then following ancient caravan routes into the desert.  Often the road was bordered by coppery red strata that had been upended and twisted by ancient cataclysms.  When we passed through small towns we noticed that people in the south dressed more conservatively than in the north, the women in black chadors with face veils—although they seemed to be doing most of the work while the men lounged in cafes, drinking coffee or mint tea.   

        It was still dark, masses of stars above us, when we reached our hotel, but almost immediately we set off in three Land Rovers toward the remote outpost of Merzouga to watch the sunrise.  At first, the desert was hard-packed with scrub jutting through its broken surface, then we alternately careened up and down over sand dunes and more of the hard-packed sand.  Finally, we stopped, tumbled out of the Land Rovers, and followed Marwan and Hala to the massive dunes of Erq Chebbi, Morocco's only genuine Sahara erg—a huge, drifting expanse of dunes that loomed in front of us like black mountains.  

         "We're not climbing those!" Sherrill exclaimed.  But we were.  A few dunes later, Sherrill and two other women stopped.  "We'll have the same view from here!" they said almost in unison.
       A party of Germans, we discovered, had ridden out on camels even earlier and already were silhouetted on the highest dune against the sky as it slowly turned pink.  The blue robes of their camel drivers stood out sharply against the rosy color of the dunes. 

​      Eventually, we hiked back to the Land Rovers and bounced to the oasis of Merzouga for breakfast at a mud brick, palm-roofed inn that had been built for trekkers.  Then we continued to Rissani, once the final stop on the caravan route south, where we found the ruins of a great caravansary.  Date palms still bristled around the oasis and straggled into the desert.  A brown-robed youth led a loaded camel past.  It was hard believe that for centuries these disintegrating mud-brick walls had been the site of a busy commercial center where East and West and South all had met.   
          The next morning, we set out across hard-packed desert, continuing deep into a gorge where red and orange desert cliffs soared to 2,000 feet, only a narrow strip of blue sky between them.  That night, we stayed at a mud brick hotel modeled after the kasbahs of old, then in the morning drove into another canyon of high cliffs, following the road of "A Thousand Kasbahs," until we reached the hilly city of Ouarzazate and its ancient kasbah that was being restored with help from UNESCO.  

            Ouarzazate has been called the Hollywood of North Africa.  Why make movies in Morocco?  It has more sun than you'll ever need, mountains and desert, historic towns, ruined fortresses, picturesque villages, and cheap labor.  Epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator and exotic pictures like Sheltering Sky and Jewel of the Nile were shot there.  Ancient as it is, Ouarzazte has a few modern hotels up the hill from the old city, used by tourists—especially it seemed from France—when they're not full of movie crews. 
         A classic car club from France touring Morocco had reached Ouarzazate just before we arrived, their cars corralled in the hotel parking lot, ranging from a fifties Impala to a couple of antique Citroens to old MGs, Mercedes, Jaguars, and BMWs.  Most of the drivers were in the hotel when we arrived, but a few still wandered among the cars, dusting them and stroking their shiny skins as if they were race horses cooling down after a run.  
          A day later, we began the trip south on the old caravan route across the rugged Anti-Atlas range, passing villages populated by Berbers and desert Arabs.  When we reached Zagora, the last oasis before the Sahara, we saw the town long before we entered, standing on the edge of the desert like a mirage.  Although there had been an oasis there for centuries, much of it had been rebuilt.  In the late afternoon, we drove a short distance to the base of the Jebel Zagora mountain, where trekkers were getting Land Rovers ready for desert exploration.  We, however, were going to climb the mountain so we could watch the sun set from its summit.  Four of the women, including Sherrill, elected to ride camels, rather than climb. 
           Marwan led the rest of us up a trail, zigzagging among rocky outcroppings.  Several times, as the sun sank lower in the sky, we stopped to catch our breath and look at the view.  By the time we reached the summit, we looked out at an impressionist painting of red, maroon, dark green, black, and brown running together.  Marwan called on his cell phone to order a couple of Land Rovers to take us back down.  However, when I saw how narrow, twisty, and steep the rocky road was—and how far the drop over the edge was—I decided to walk down.  One other person said she'd walk down with me, rather than wait for the Land Rovers.  

​          I didn't see Sherrill or the camels at the top, but eventually found her and the other women looking just fine near some shops a short distance from the mountain base.  They'd ridden the camels around the oasis, explored several stores, and had refreshments.  Once we were all together, we drove into the desert to a Bedouin camp where we'd spend the night.  The narrow road disappeared in the darkness and, finally, we stopped and walked further into the desert—almost like Marlene Dietrich hiking into the sand after Gary Cooper in the old movie Morocco.
      A multihued wall of tent material hung from poles, beyond it a circle of tents illuminated by strings of small electric lights.  Beyond the camp, we saw only blackness.  As we stepped through an opening in the fabric wall into the first of two large circles, Bedouin men greeted us and took us to the tents where we'd spend the night.  Around midnight, we were told, the electric lights would be turned off to save the generators, but lanterns would be set out.
            We cleaned up as well as we could, then sat at two round tables where a feast of Moroccan dishes appeared.  After all that exercise, we were starving.  It had been quite a day and evening.  When we woke up in the morning, we saw that we were surrounded by rolling waves of sand.  A gold and brown scorpion crawled onto the red carpet, barbed tail aloft.
             "It won't bother you," Sherrill told me, "if you don't bother it." 
             Just the same, I wasn't happy until I'd crushed it and got rid of the remains.
           After breakfast, we drove back along the route we'd come, returning to Ouarzazate, past rugged rock formations and several kasbahs, some crumbling, others still standing on the cliffs.  

​          A day later, we drove again through stony desert, this time toward Marrakesh, romantic city of legend.  On the way, we passed an Egyptian ruin with gigantic statues of pharaohs and gods—a movie set created for the remake of The Mummy, now abandoned to hot desert winds.  Before long, we came to the rosy-hued kasbah of Ait Ben Haddou, one of the best preserved kasbahs of the region, featured in at least twenty films, including Lawrence of Arabia, Jesus of Nazareth, and Jewel of the Nile.   

          Hiking across a dry riverbed and up narrow steps cut into the reddish clay between mud-brick houses, we made our way into the remains of the town.  Only a few of the houses were lived in, now, but an old woman drew us into hers to show us her weaving.  First, however, with a toothless grin, she pointed to her autographed photograph of Harrison Ford, given to her when he was there making one of the "Indiana Jones" movies.  She may never have seen the movie, or any other movie, but was proud of that photograph.  
         Returning to the other side of the river, we found a little outdoor restaurant with a view of the kasbah.  The food was good, but the place was swarming with flies.  We had to spread paper napkins to protect our plates. 
         "One of reasons that Jimmy Carter was given the Nobel Peace Prize," Sherrill told us, "was his work to eliminate the flies in Africa that get in people's eyes and cause blindness."
       "Thank you for sharing that," replied one of the group, waving flies away from his face.
           "Does North Africa count?" asked somebody else.  
          Then we began our climb into the High Atlas mountains, through a lunar landscape of red, orange, and brown cliffs and canyons.  It was hard to imagine camel caravans making their way along that route, but they did for hundreds of years.  Finally, we descended into the valley and reached thousand year-old, pink-hued Marrakesh, for centuries an important caravan stop, then a French city, now a major arts center and the base for our final week in Morocco.

​            The old city and the ville nouvelle were close to each other, making it easy to explore both.  We started with the sixteenth century al-Badi Palace, an elaborate ruin where the Marrakesh film festival was held every year.  We also saw that the storks had returned to Morocco, comfortably settled on their nests atop mud-brick walls and towers.
            One morning, we explored the notorious Marjorelle Gardens, owned then by Yves Saint-Laurent, but created between 1922 and 1962 by French painter Jacques Marjorelle.  Sherrill was amused by the stylized garden, the palm trees, cactus beds, fountains, and ponds.  Vivid blue pavilions, urns, low border walls, and a blue and rose-brown house helped set off the plants.  Morocco seemed to be a land of dramatic contradictions, of economically desperate people doing whatever they needed to survive and ferociously stylish decadence.  

​            That evening, we experienced a little of the human comedy and drama of the huge Djemaa El-Fna Square (Square of the Dead).  Musicians, storytellers, acrobats, jugglers, men with monkeys and snakes, wandered among scores of food vendors, competing for tips.  Some  tourists had found their way to the square and the surrounding roof-top cafes, but the locals far out-numbered them.  For a while, we sipped drinks in a roof-top cafe, gazing down on the square as waves of semi-organized chaos ebbed and flowed across it. 
          A side trip through harsh but oddly beautiful country took us to the coastal town of Essaouira, where Orson Welles filmed part of his low-budget Othello in 1948, shooting part of it in a steam bath with his cast draped in sheets because he couldn't afford costumes.  Small blue boats rested on the stone embankment below an 18th century Portuguese fort.  Several of us of walked out to a small seafood restaurant.  Sherrill ordered sardines and was astonished when she got a platter so large that we shared it with three other people. 

          Hala had arranged a farewell dinner for us deep in the Marrakesh medina, where we were served a series of dishes unlike anything we'd had before, starting with mezze with a Moroccan twist, then continuing with main courses that included a pastille (a Moroccan specialty of pastry filled with ground pigeon, lemon-flavored eggs, almonds, cinnamon, saffron, and sugar encased in layer after layer of the thinnest pastry), then moving on to chicken with lemon and olive, and finally juicy spit-roasted lamb carved at the table, followed by an array of sweets.  We all ate too much, but it was too wonderful to regret a single decadent bite. 
To be continued....  
​

​If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
                             Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
 

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 57 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.   

​              Fewer people were traveling immediately after 9/11, but lines were longer because they didn't understand yet the new security procedures.  While Sherrill and I sat in the departure lounge at SFO to board our flight, the captain of another American Airlines plane came out to talk to waiting passengers. 
              "Thank you for your courage flying so soon after the events of September 11," he said.  "New procedures are now required on the plane.  No wandering or milling about.  You'll have to stay in your seats and ask the flight attendants to go to the lavatory." 
              After we'd boarded, our captain repeated what the first had said, adding: "For the first twenty minutes of the flight no one can get up, not even to go to the lavatory."
              Later in the flight, I noticed that before one of the pilots came out of the cockpit, a flight attendant blocked the aisle with a food cart until the pilot was locked again behind the cockpit door.  When we flew into Kennedy, where we changed planes for Paris, we saw the Manhattan skyline minus the twin towers.  The Empire State Building again dominated the view.  

       We were traveling independently again, and without reservations.  We landed in Paris early in the morning, took a train into the city, crossed it by Metro to Gare St. Lazare, got a train to the little town of Vernon, where we found a hotel, left our bags, and took a taxi to Monet's home across the river in Giverny.  We felt quite pleased that it all worked the way we'd hoped.    
       "They look just like the paintings," Sherrill said, as I followed her among Monet's gardens and ponds.
     As a gardener, Sherrill loved exploring the paths and alcoves of the gardens, studying the range of colors, the textures and patterns, the way the light drifted across the flowers, trees, and water.  Years before, in Japan and after, we'd learned a little about Japanese prints and admired those that Monet had collected, hung in his house, loved, and been inspired by.  After a glorious half day in Monet's flowery wonderland, however, we discovered that there was no bus back to Vernon.
           "Okay," I said, "I guess we'll walk."
           "Don't worry."  She patted my back.  "It'll be fine."  
           So we did, three miles back to the Hotel d'Evreux, in a restored medieval building, where we cleaned up under the sloping ceiling of our room before descending to the cave-like dining room and a Michelin two-star dinner that we savored despite the glassy-eyed stares of an antlered deer and a bristly boar on the wall above our table. 

​              The next morning, we passed through Paris again on our way to Chartres, still with our luggage—fortunately, carry-on only, since we had to change trains.  After passing dry corn fields and yellow-green pastures in which white cows stoically munched, we saw the huge gray bulk of Chartres cathedral on the horizon, still dominating everything around it after a thousand years.  From the station it was an easy walk, even carrying our suitcases.  Because of bomb scares, no railroad station in France allowed luggage to be left in lockers, but nobody said a word when we carried it into the cathedral.  Our timing was perfect to join a lecture/tour with British author and Chartres authority Malcolm Miller.  For more than an hour, we followed his tall, white-haired figure, absorbing his wisdom and trying to keep our suitcases out of sight.  

            A train from Chartres took us to Rennes, as close as we'd get that evening to Mont St. Michel.  Happy to get a room near the station, we discovered in the old town a tiny, quite good, vegetarian restaurant run by a pair of skinny young men.  The next morning, a short train trip got us to Pontorson on the coast, but we missed the bus to Mont St. Michel.  The island, a man-made mountain of stone against the sky, taunted us at the end of its causeway, but a ten minute taxi ride got us and our suitcases to the island.  The narrow streets inside the walls were crowded with day trippers ricocheting from one touristy shop to another. 
         "You wouldn't have a room for us, would you?" I asked the receptionist at a small hotel wedged into a sharp bend on the steep main street. 
  "Of course, monsieur," she smiled.  "A nice one with a view toward the bay."  
          "Virtue rewarded," Sherrill whispered in my ear.
          That evening, after exploring the island and abbey, we relaxed with drinks in a cocktail lounge looking over the bay, while young French people played bagpipes and danced on the dry mudflats below.  Later, after dinner, we walked out onto the causeway to look back at the island and abbey.  With the day trippers gone, it was easy to imagine this still was the medieval town.  Before we left a day later, the hotel receptionist called ahead to Tours, our gateway to the Loire valley, to reserve a room for us. 
      "Come stay with us again, madam," she told Sherrill.  "We enjoyed having you." 

           We hoped to get every place we wanted without renting a car.  At first, it looked iffy for the Loire, but we found a day tour that did the job for us, beginning with Chateau du Clos Luce, the little palace that King Francis I of France gave to Leonardo da Vinci, where he spent his last three years, working as engineer, architect, and producer of shows for the court, as well as refining the painting that he carried with him everywhere, the Mona Lisa.  Although we visited several other, grander, palaces, this one remained our favorite.  Chenonceau, the famous palace that straddled a river over a parade of arches and flaunted several very large, very formal gardens designed in precise geometric shapes, irritated Sherrill.
            "Anybody with a ruler can do that," she muttered, "but it's not what I call a garden." 

​          The other palaces of the Loire had their charms, but two especially stand out in memory.  The chateau of Chambord was ridiculously huge, but we were amused by the twisting double staircase designed by Leonardo so that Francis I's queen and mistress could pass without confronting each other.  The palace of Cheveny was the model for the chateau shown in the Tintin illustrated adventure stories that our son-in-law and grandson had enjoyed.  In fact, a museum on the grounds was devoted to the character of Tintin, his comrades, and their adventures—too bad that Paul and Leo weren't with us. 

​              "Our wedding turned out to be much smaller than we planned," a pair of newlyweds on the day tour told Sherrill and me.  "No one could get there," the bride mourned, "because of the restrictions on air traffic right after the disasters in New York."  
              It was becoming clear that the world was never going to be the same—and probably in ways that we couldn't imagine, yet.

​              We'd thought of Nimes as a jumping off point for the great Roman aqueduct of the Pont du Gard, but discovered that it had been a major Roman city.  Our first job, as usual, was a place to stay, then we explored the town, from the huge Roman Arena, still used for events 2,000 years after it was built, to a perfectly preserved little temple, a Roman tower, and more from the ancient city.  Along the way, we located the bus station, where an agent patiently explained the route to the Pont du Gare, including where we'd have to transfer to a second bus.  Tourists complain about how the French can be terse and grumpy, but we found them helpful and kind.  Usually. 
              Suddenly, there it was, the huge aqueduct, stretching across a steep gorge above a river bed, as impressive as ever after two millennia.  We walked across it, gazing back from different vantage points.  People were sunbathing on the gravel beach below, swimming in the river, and hiking around it, as if it were a natural phenomenon, something they might find in Yosemite or Yellowstone.  

​              However, our favorite memory of Nimes turned out to be a small restaurant that caught our eye.  The very fat chef/manager came out, explained his menu to us, then took our orders for when we returned later.  Restaurant l'Ancien Theatre gave us one of the best meals of our lives, concluding with a remarkable black olive pie for dessert.  Often in our travels, it seemed, we stumbled onto these wonderful experiences—and never forgot them. 
              "Remember that black olive pie?" Sherrill or I would ask the other years later, and we'd nod and smile and reminisce.  
              For a while, we were afraid that we'd have to sleep in a doorway of the monumental Pope's Palace in Avignon, but finally we found a modest room and spent the rest of the day being awed by the magnificence of the Pope's court and wandering the twisting medieval streets until we reached the river and the "Pont d'Avignon," where Sherrill sang the old song to me.  Everything, we congratulated each other, worked out for us.  Then it was on to Milan, by way of a couple of days in Nice, staying in a seedy little hotel run by a talkative old lady with hennaed hair and scarlet toenails, right out of a Tennessee Williams play—French version.  

​           Mussolini's huge 1930 train station was an intimidating introduction to Milan, but Sherrill and I found a hotel opposite, did a little sight-seeing, and got ready for our train trip the next day to Venice, where we'd meet our friends Lee and Karen.  At last, we'd stay in one place for a week, sharing a house with our old pals from Oregon.    
          The train hurtled across the top of Italy, through Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, and Padova—all places we'd return to on later trips—reaching Venice in the late afternoon.  By the time we bought our week passes for the vaporetto and made the trip on the #1 the full winding length of the Grand Canal to the Arsenale stop, it was five o'clock.  We discovered our friends sitting under an awning at a cafe facing the waterfront, eating gelato and sipping coffee.  It was hard to believe that it had been several years since we'd seen each other.  We joined them for coffee until the "Capitano," the colorful fellow who was renting us the apartment, arrived to turn over the keys—which he finally did with a flourish and many explanations, pronouncements, and good wishes. 

​              The apartment was narrow, but tall, which made sense in a city with a shortage of land: kitchen and living room on the ground floor, two bedrooms and a bath above that, a spare bed on a landing higher up, and another bathroom on the top, as well as a small deck.  That evening—our thirty-seventh wedding anniversary—the four of us had dinner together in a local restaurant.  What better way to celebrate our anniversary than with friends in Venice? 

​              The next day, we discovered Frida Kahlo paintings at St. Mark's Square, met another couple that Sherrill and I knew from Southeast Asia and who happened to be in Venice at the same time, staying near the leaning campanile of Santo Stephano.  As the days spooled out, we visited the Peggy Guggenheim Museum of modern art, the Accademia galleries, rediscovered a restaurant on a little side canal that we'd enjoyed in 1978, and bought fruit and vegetables in markets along the Rue Garibaldi near the Arsenale. 

​              Sherrill always loved traveling on water, so I knew she'd enjoy our trip with Lee and Karen up the Brenta Canal, visiting palazzos of the Veneto, including several designed by Palladio.  The countryside was lush and green, the villas were elegant, and the energetic young guide seemed to know everyone along the canal, greeting and joking with them as we chugged along.  

​              Sherrill and I were up early the next morning to take a train to Trieste, since Lee and Karen were feeling a bit under the weather.  As we walked along Trieste's waterfront, we saw a large yacht that had been docked near our Arsenale vaporetto stop.
              "They beat us here!" Sherrill gestured at the fancy boat.  "They could've given us a ride."
              Visitors to Trieste can get a James Joyce walking tour map now and will pass a statue of Joyce as they walk up from the train station and harbor, but none of that existed then.  Still, we knew that Joyce and his Nora left that same station when they arrived in 1904 and he parked her on a bench across the street while he found a place to stay—and got drunk.  As we walked those streets, passing the marina and turning toward the hills, we couldn't help but think of Joyce—after all, he lived there 15 years.  At the top, we looked out at the red tile roofs in front of the blue-green Adriatic, visited the remains of a Roman forum, and then strolled down to the old town for the two-hour train journey back to Venice.  

​              The rest of the week, the four of us alternated exploring Venice and sitting around with glasses of wine.  We took in a retrospective of the strange, brilliant paintings of Balthus, visited the old Jewish Quarter, spent some time at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco to see the huge Tintoretto masterpieces again, and had lunch with some of  Lee and Karen's friends from Oregon.  Then we said goodbye to Karen and Lee.  They were heading north to Lake Como, while we were going south to Ravenna.  

              The last capital of the Western Empire, the little city of Ravenna was crowded with glories from the past.  Since Sherrill had done mosaic work, herself, she especially wanted to see the Byzantine mosaics.  We bought combination tickets to see the six major sites in Ravenna, starting with the 1,500 year old Basilica of San Vitale, unadorned brick outside, jaw-droppingly beautiful inside, filled with brilliant mosaics, including stylized portraits of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora and their retinues.  By evening, we were foot-sore but happy and the Piazza del Popolo, which seemed to be the center of town, was jumping with activity.  Earlier, we'd noticed little kids watching a Punch and Judy show there, but now musicians were playing, bigger kids were dancing, and the evening was just starting.  We collapsed with wine and food and let the music and the memories of the day wash over us.  
              Over the years, Italy had become our favorite destination: we knew that we'd never discover all of its treasures, but it was fun to try.  From Ravenna, we rode the train to Verona, another city in which the ancient world and succeeding centuries were jumbled together.  The bathroom in our hotel room was so small that we had to put our feet in the shower to use the toilet, but nearby stood the Romanesque Basilica of San Zeno, Sherrill's second favorite church in Europe (after Vezalay in France).   
              The trains in Italy were frequent and usually on time.  From Verona we sped up to Lake Como, where we bought a ferryboat pass so we could explore the towns around the lake.  Then it was back to Milan.  Early one morning, we waited outside Milan's Tourist Information Office until it opened so we could buy timed tickets for the day's three-hour city tour that included a guaranteed visit to Leonardo's restored "Last Supper" mural, now protected by a modern security system and bullet-proof glass.  We'd seen it 20 years before, but not since this restoration.  The colors and lines of the painting were truer, now, making it easier to feel the human drama of the scene.  
              A few more days in Milan, where we ran into our friends Lee and Karen again, and it was back to California, but this wouldn't be our last trip to France and Italy. 
To be continued....  
​

 
If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
                             Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
​

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 56 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.   
​

​"I hope we see the volcano erupt," Sherrill told me, as we flew into San Jose, Costa Rica.
         "Which volcano?"
         "Any volcano—the big one."
        Since Costa Rica was crowded with volcanoes, around 100 of them, at least seven active in 2001, there was a chance that she'd get her wish. 
       Sherrill had always been fascinated by volcanoes.  Years before, on one of our trips to visit her mother in Hawaii, we'd stayed at the lodge on top of Kilauea, next to the huge caldera and had watched grenades of steam shoot from the red-rimmed, half-hardened lava as it cracked, bubbled, and shook, but no eruption broke through the shell around the crater. 
            "I'm never here at the right time," she'd mourned.  

          I remember now how she enjoyed gazing down into the mile-wide steaming caldera of Costa Rica's Poas Volcano, but we saw no lava flow from that crater either, although the bubbling noises and stink of sulphurous vapors were impressive.  As I write this, Kilauea in Hawaii is pushing red hot molten rivers through forests and farms.  Volcanoes are uncontrollable and often destructive, but eventually they leave the dark rich soil that, with the help of rain and tropical sunshine, makes possible rainforests, plantations, and farms in places such as Hawaii and Costa Rica—soil that we learned was ideal for growing Costa Rican coffee. 
          Several days before gazing into the volcano, we flew into San Jose, the country's capitol and largest city.  Trapped in a valley encircled by volcanic mountains, the city presented a colorful, sometimes bizarre, jumble of old and new: from colonial-era homes to faceless office buildings and high-rise hotels, from eighteenth century neoclassic buildings to recently constructed factories and shops, from quite nice public parks to gaudy neon lights and intrusive billboards.  

​        Sherrill and I often made new friends while traveling, but from time to time we traveled with old friends, usually on short trips to places such as Yosemite or Oregon.  However, this time, we joined four people we'd known for many years to explore Costa Rica and Panama.  We'd already traveled to Alaska with Cathy and Larry and had shared many good times with sisters Alice and Marion, as well.  This trip was more structured than many we'd taken, but we enjoyed it because the area was beautiful and unique  and we were sharing it with such good friends.  The six of us together, I think, probably had a richer experience than any one of us might have had alone.  

             We didn't know whether to applaud or to giggle when a local guide took us through the thousand seat Teatro Nacional in San Jose.  Its over-the-top fresco-covered ceilings, lavish gold trim, velvet draperies, ornate sculptures, stupendous chandeliers, and grand staircases might have been a parody of what people often think of as Victorian decor, but the city obviously was proud of this monster theater.  After all, it had been paid for by nineteenth century coffee barons.  Just as dazzling in its own way was the Gold Museum, especially the exhibits of pre-Columbian artifacts. The craftsmanship of the miniature jaguars, eagles, crocodiles, and other pieces impressed us as much as the gold from which they were made.
            A trip to a mountainside coffee plantation and mill gave us an idea of how those coffee barons ade their fortunes.  We followed the process from the  planting of the seedlings to growing the coffee plants, then harvesting, sorting, peeling, fermenting, and drying the "coffee cherries" to produce the beans.  It didn't take long before we felt high just from the rich coffee aromas—and, of course, our hosts were hoping we'd buy and take home quantities of their product. 

        This all was very entertaining, but we also were eager to see the flora and fauna for which Costa Rica was famous.  More than a quarter of the country's land was dedicated to national parks.  The next day, we plunged into the tropical rain forest of Braulio Carrillo National Park, gliding at varying heights in the open gondolas of an aerial tram, sometimes skimming along just above the river, other times just under the variegated shade of the tree canopy.  
     "Those are houseplants!" Sherrill exclaimed, pointing to giant philodendrons with leaves as big as a small car.  "Don't they know that?"
        Monster elephant ears and gigantic ferns growing below and around us dwarfed the ones that she grew in our Berkeley garden and the lush quantities of orchids and bromeliads put to shame her own formidable collection.  Moss and lichen coated tree trunks and branches with a scabrous greenish skin and the shameless blossoms of unfamiliar flowers played hide-and-seek through the shadowy green foliage.  Above our heads, low clouds flirted with the whispering tree tops.  Mist briefly turned into a drizzle, but we soon left it behind.  

           From time to time, we glimpsed a living creature, sometimes debating what it was that we actually saw.  Was that a tapir?  That noisy one definitely was a howler monkey, but wasn't that a sloth lounging in the tree over there?  The huge-billed toucan was hard to miss and somebody thought that another bird fit the description of a quetzal, but we couldn't be sure.  Sherrill was excited to see an unusual variety of hummingbird, just for a second, of course.  We were overgrown kids playing a wonderful game with no winners or losers—and this was only the first of several national parks that we'd be visiting.  

​              The next afternoon, we boarded the 138 passenger Yorktown Clipper at Puerto Caldera on the Pacific coast and sailed south, during the night arriving in Curu, gateway to the Curu Wildlife Refuge.  After breakfast, we shuttled on Zodiac landing craft to the shore, where we had the day to explore the refuge's beaches, mangrove swamps, and forests.  Sherrill's love of birding had grown during recent years, so she was determined to find at least a few of the more than one hundred species said to live in the refuge—most of them birds unknown to me.
              "Don't worry," she told me.  "You don't need to stay with me.  I know you'd be bored."
              She was right.  I didn't have the patience to stare through binoculars into trembling leaves, trying to focus on a bit of color that might turn out to be certain type of woodpecker or hawk, so instead I hiked along jungle trails and actually glimpsed an armadillo, a white-faced capuchin monkey, and a raccoon.  The fact that I had been annoyed many times by raccoons in my own backyard didn't spoil the fun of catching sight of one in the wild.  At least, this one wasn't going to tip over my garbage can.  Meanwhile, Sherrill added several exotic birds to her ever-growing list, but when she told me their names I was no wiser than before. 

        One of the best things about being on a tour is that it keeps you moving.  It's harder to say to yourself, "I don't feel like doing anything, now.  I'll just have a leisurely lunch and sit here in the sun."  When there's a lot happening and other people are doing it, you don't want to be left out and miss some wonderful experience.  The Marenco Biological Station on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula the next day promised us more than 500 kinds of trees, 140 types of mammals, and—drum roll, please—400 bird species. 
            "Marenco has been so well protected," the ship's naturalist told us, "that it's home to many species that are rare or have totally vanished anywhere else in Central America.  It was a battle, but the scientists and conservationists managed to defeat the lumbermen who wanted to destroy our rainforest.  And don't forget that it's visitors like you who help pay for these parks and preserves."  
            A very effective sales pitch, we agreed. 

​              Once on shore, we went our separate directions, whether hunting for emerald green parrots and other rare birds, moseying along the beach, or hiking into the forest with a local guide, hoping to meet an anteater or python—an exciting, sometimes physically challenging day, but rewarding.  After the hike through the forest, where I saw plenty of interesting sights, but no anteater or python, I walked down to the beach, where an astonishing vision appeared in the water off shore: a large white yacht with multiple white sails rising in several snowy tiers.
              What, I wondered, would it be like to cruise around in a boat like that?  Then I noticed a woman in an expensive-looking beach outfit a few yards away, also looking out to sea.

          "A beautiful ship," I said.
    "I'm on it," she replied.  "A passenger."  She stepped closer.  "Believe me, you don't want to be on it.  You never met such boring people."  I must've looked surprised, because she added, "They don't give a damn about any of this."  She gestured broadly at the beach and the rainforest behind us.  "Too busy trying to impress each other with how important they are.  They came on the cruise just because it was expensive."  She turned sharply toward me.  "Are you on that little boat I saw earlier?"  I admitted that I was.  "I'd rather be on that.  I'm sure you're seeing more than we are.  And are with nicer people."  Then she started to walk away, but glanced back briefly.  "I don't want to miss cocktail hour—the highlight of our day." 
           The next day, when we were at sea on the way to Panama, gave us an opportunity to hear lectures from the guest speakers on board, including a very informative one about Panama's Darien Jungle, where we'd soon arrive, and to enjoy the sea breezes on deck while looking out for seabirds and whales—maybe even a school of dolphins, if we were lucky.  Who needed all those fancy sails?

           Some of us had mixed feelings about our visit to the Choco indigenous tribe in the Darien jungle.  We were told that the Choco were living as they always had in their open-sided thatch-roofed huts built on stilts, still decorated their skin with the black juice of a certain native plant, and still got around in a kind of canoe called a cayuco, traditionally carved from a tree trunk.  To start with, the "cayucos" in which they took us up river to their village were much larger than the traditional ones, were not made from a tree trunk, and were motorized.

​              The ride up the Samu River did give us a chance for a closer view of the rainforest and to hear various bird species along the way, maybe even a wild animal or two, but despite their native dress the Choco seemed quite sophisticated as they displayed and sold us their baskets and carvings.  For that matter, their "authentic" village had a bit of a Disneyland feel to it.  At the same time, they managed to be rather charming during these exchanges, even if they were adept at marketing their wares and making change. 

        That evening, the Yorktown Clipper began its journey toward the Panama Canal, for many passengers the much anticipated highlight of the trip.  Following dinner, we watched the NOVA documentary, A Man, a  Plan, a Canal—Panama.  Early the next morning, we took on board an official pilot, passed Panama City and then under the Bridge of the Americas, soaring 384 feet above us, and left the Pacific Ocean to begin our journey through the great canal.  The achievement of actually designing and building this canal that took us across the Isthmus of Panama and through three sets of locks that raised the ship 85 feet at the Continental Divide and then lowered her again to sea level before reaching the Caribbean, was almost beyond our comprehension.  The grinding sounds and thumpthumpthump of engines and machinery rose with us we began our ascent on the stair-step Miraflores Locks that lifted us to Miraflores Lake.  

         Eventually, after more locks and slowly moving through the Gaillard Cut—eight-miles tortuously carved through rock and shale—we reached man-made Gatun Lake, where we sailed around several islands and peninsulas.  Our ship felt very small and vulnerable as we passed between the mountains towering on both sides.  For a while, we stopped in the lake while several passengers descended down the side of the ship for a swim, so they could say that they'd swum in the Panama Canal.  

              One of the most dangerous, high crime cities in the world: that was what we'd heard about Colon, where the cruise ended, but we didn't have a chance to discover this for ourselves.  We were whisked to the airport, where we were hustled onto a plane to Panama City for our flights back home—protected whether we wanted to be, or not.  Sherrill and I would have to come back if we wanted the adventure of being mugged in the tropics. 
To be continued.... 
             

If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
                             Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
​

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 55 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.   

​              Snapshots from Burma, 18 years ago:
          Sherrill gazing up at an oversized Buddha wedged into a pagoda, representing an imprisoned Burmese king.
              A child monk with shaved head and innocent eyes at the door of a teak monastery.
              A 1950 bus built from teak in a jungle village.
              A forest of ancient Buddhist stupas. 

​              Two thousand stupas in one place was almost beyond imagining, but when we stopped briefly at the little town of Kakku there they were: 2,478 Buddhist stupas, to be precise, the remains of an ancient hillside display once twice as large.  Some of them were 30 or 40 feet tall, others no more than 15 or 20 feet.  Sherrill and I had learned in a class we took years before on Indian philosophies and religions that the shape of the stupa represented male fertility.  Was this collection an example, I wondered, of over-compensation?  

             Bouncing along country roads in northeastern Burma with our local guide, her orange and black outfit incongruously suggesting Halloween, we reached the high altitude city of Taunggyi—once a British hill town—and our hotel.  As soon as Sherrill and I were in our room, a power failure put us in the dark.  When the electricity came back on, I had to get a bellboy to replace several burned out light bulbs and bring more toilet paper.  The rolls he eventually brought turned out to be a third the size of a standard roll. 
             Sherrill shook her head.  "Some poor employee is probably in a back room rerolling toilet paper to make these mini-rolls," 

             We were in Taunggyi for the Hot Air Balloon Festival.  Each year, thousands of Burmese gathered to send prayers aloft on scores of huge, richly decorated paper balloons powered by little burners producing hot air.  Each balloon was studded with tiny lit candles, creating spectacular effects as the balloons surged above the excited crowds.  
               The next afternoon, before the evening balloon rising, Sherrill and I walked down the hill from our hotel, past guest houses and old homes that had been around since the days when the colonial British came to escape summer heat, to the main street, now lined on both sides of the pavement with temporary booths.  Most of them were selling food and drink, but some were hawking posters and photos of Burmese musical stars, souvenirs of the festival, and toys—especially plastic guns, some of them very realistic.

​                 A dinner in the hotel before we headed to the festival, conversation mostly was about the 2000 U. S. election that had just taken place.  A woman from a table across the room came over and asked if we were Americans, then pleaded for news about the election results, but we knew no more than she did because of Burma's communications blackout.
              Then, in our warmest clothes, flashlights in hand, we followed our friend Hala downhill to the festival as music throbbed through the trees, joining local people going the same direction, including groups of monks, some as young seven or six years old.
              "Look!" Sherrill told me, gesturing to a very small Buddhist monk with shaved head and red robe, eyes wide with excitement, his hands clutching a teddy bear purse.  

            Slowly, we moved into a vast area crowded with people, trying to stay upright on the sloping ground—not so easy when being nudged and pushed by people jockeying for the best view of ascending balloons.  In the center of this turbulent ocean of bodies, a huge paper balloon was being readied under portable lights to soar into the night.  Different groups from the city and surrounding areas competed to make the most beautiful balloon, the one that flew the highest, and the one that released the most spectacular fireworks display.  

            From our vantage point on a small rise, we watched the undulating sea of human silhouettes, the candles of vendors flickering among them.

​              The paper skin of the balloon began to swell, until its full shape emerged, wider than an automobile and several times as tall, quivering in the breeze, its slightly puckered skin decorated with tiny lanterns forming outlines of Buddha and other religious symbols.  Then it was fired up, flames brilliant under its mouth.  It sucked in the heat, shook, and rose steadily, pulling with it the contraption on which the timed fireworks were fastened.  Now, the balloon climbed straight up and began shooting out its fireworks.
          
            As that balloon continued its ascent, another group began readying their balloon and a third brought in theirs on a decorated truck and trailer, led by men and boys playing drums, chanting, and dancing.  Seventeen balloons went up that night and more than 400 ascended during the week-long festival.  

​              A 35 minute flight on a Yangon Airways propeller plane took us to Mandalay's new international airport.  With the longest runways in Southeast Asia, it was built by the Burmese government so that jumbo jets could land in the north of the country, but so far only one Thai and one Japanese jet had landed.  Our Mandalay hotel stood opposite the restored moat and walled grounds of the old Burmese palace. 
              We could enter the temples, now, only through arcades selling religious souvenirs and offerings for Buddha.  Shoes weren't allowed in the arcades, any more than in the temples, which forced us to maneuver our naked feet among bird droppings and red globs of betel nut juice spit. 
              After a barefoot hike through the arcade at the Maha Muni Temple, we came to a crowd of men shuffling toward a platform where we could see only the top half of a serenely smiling bronze Buddha.  As we got closer, we discovered that his lower half had been transformed into a lumpy gold mass—the result of countless small offerings of thin gold leaf pressed onto him.  Women weren't allowed into the shrine surrounding the statue because they would've had to pass in front of praying monks, which would have been—we were told—disrespectful. 
              "That," Sherrill declared, "is ridiculous.  And sexist."
              The other women in our group agreed, but they all had to wait below. 

             For a couple of days, I'd had a temperature of around 102, even as we visited marble-cutting and marionette workshops, so our hotel called a doctor for me while the others explored more of Mandalay.  A slim man about forty, wearing a blue longhi and white shirt and carrying a black medical bag, he studied me from behind small oval eyeglasses while I explained about my fever and chills, then asked me questions, took my temperature and blood pressure, thumped my chest, listened to my heart, and decided that I had an upper respiratory tract viral infection and gave me antibiotics to prevent a secondary bacterial infection.  For his examination and the medicine, he charged me $40. 
              The next day, I still didn't feel well enough to go on the scheduled expedition, so I wrote, drank water, took my temperature, wrapped myself up, and sweat.  And sweat.  Later, as long as I was hanging out in the hotel, I went down to reception and asked if I could send an email.  The clerk told me that I could use word processing to write my email onto a disk.  They would send it for me.  Well, I decided, it was better than nothing.  I had no doubt that it would be scrutinized before it was sent, but my daughter back in California did get the email and it even seemed to be what I'd written.  

             As intriguing as present-day Burma (or Myanmar) was, its long history also fascinated us.  Early one morning, we drove across Mandalay to a subsidiary of the Irrawaddy river and boarded a primitive wooden ferry that took us to the opposite shore, where we climbed into battered horse-drawn carts.  We were on our way to explore the ruins of Ava, Burma's capital from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, until an earthquake in 1838 destroyed it.  Passing through an opening in the remains of once massive city walls, we spent several hours in a strange world of gigantic, often beautiful, ruins, viper-filled countryside, and ramshackle villages in what had been a great city.  

​              Another flight on a two-propeller Yangon Airways plane took us to the greatest example of Burma's glorious past: the magnificent temple city of Pagan (or Bagan, according to the new style).  Silhouetted against a dimming blue-gray horizon, the elaborate shapes of stupas and temples seemed to grow organically from the open plain.  As shades of pink and blue sky faded and darkened behind small stupas and large temples, we might have been moving among strangely shaped monsters hunkered down for the night.   

           Our new hotel, in the heart of the archeological zone, was a Burmese version of rambling hacienda.  Dinner was at long tables on a lawn near the river, a full moon glowing through the trees.  At breakfast the next morning, we could see more clearly the river and the centuries old brick temples around us.  We began our exploring with one of the largest, the gold-sheathed Shwezigon Pagoda, built in 1113 to hold a sacred replica of Buddha's tooth,  one of more than 4,000 pagodas originally built there, although only about 2,000 survived.  According to his astrology, the king was to build a pagoda where an elephant rested, so he had an elephant followed until it stopped, and this was the place.    

             Everywhere we looked across the dry plain, stupas and temples baked in the sun, some small, others large, some crumbling.  We tried to picture what this area must have looked like when the great city of Pagan was at its glory, with the population necessary to construct and support 4,000 temples. For 200 years, it was one of the great cities of the world, whether anybody in Europe knew about it, or not.
          Some of the temples were decorated inside with delicately drawn frescos, some rose to astonishing heights, manmade mountains of ornate stone, many were covered with otherworldly shapes.  One temple built in 1218 rose in two levels to a hundred and fifty feet.  A twelfth century temple rose in wedding cake tiers to 200 feet.  Several of us climbed the huge Mingalazedi Temple to watch the changing hues of the sky wash over the temples and pagodas as the sun set.  Climbing down the precipitous, uneven steps in the dark was less fun. 

​              Our group met in the hotel lobby before dinner to toast our friend Hala on her birthday, then went out to the tables on the lawn for dinner.  Before we ate, our guide brought out a surprise birthday cake with lit candles.  Over the years, Hala had surprised many of us with birthday cakes, so we were glad that this time she was surprised.
​
              Back home, reading a history of the Pagan area, I discovered that it nearly became the site of a major World War II battle between retreating Japanese forces and the allies.  Fortunately, one man, G.H. Luce, a scholar who had devoted his life to studying Burmese history and culture, went to the allied headquarters to stop the pursuit through the archaeological zone.  For this, whether people know his name or not, G.H. Luce will always be one of the heroes of world civilization. 

​        On our Silk Air flight from Rangoon to Singapore, I sat next to a German who admitted that he was a journalist, although on his visa application he'd said that he was a tourist, because Burma wouldn't admit foreign journalists.  He said that all the time he was there he felt as if Big Brother was watching him. 
           "People are afraid of informers," he told me.  "Only when we were trekking in the wilderness would they open up to me." 
​
         When they did talk freely, he said, they expressed anger about corruption in the government.  Despite profits from agriculture, oil production, ruby mining, lumber harvesting, and other resources, the people grew poorer.  The money all was channeled, he told me, to the military dictators.  The people were angry, but afraid.  He'd been surprised to see that the young Burmese were sincere and devout Buddhists, but felt that the religion made them too docile.  

              He added that he had no doubt that the opium poppies grown in the so-called Golden Triangle in northeast Burma and sold for heroin were originally planted by the CIA to pay for the Vietnam war.  I had no way of knowing how much of what the German said was true.  The human problem, no matter how it is shaped, never goes away.  Now, the world is shocked by the ongoing assault of Myanmar's generals on the Rohingya minority.  When we were there 18 years ago, none of this had surfaced, but today we know that thousands of Rohingya suffer in refugee camps.  
To be continued....  
​

If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
                             Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
​